The post The Top Affiliate Program Plugins For WordPress – Free And Paid! appeared first on James McAllister Online.
]]>Unlike so many other plugin choices, this one doesn’t only affect you. Once you have affiliates registered on your blog or website and they’re actively earning commissions, it will be far more difficult to switch systems later. Even if you’re able to migrate accounts and data, it can be difficult to get everything transitioned seamlessly if you decide you want to change plugins later.
I don’t say this to scare you, but to illustrate an important point – this is a topic you’ll really want to research before you commit to any final decisions.
In this article, I will be covering the top affiliate management plugs for WordPress – comparing and contrasting them against each other, to help you decide which plugin is best for your affiliate program. Note that this is solely based around plugins that are designed to help you run your own affiliate program for your products and services. This list does not include any plugins to help you with affiliate marketing itself.
Let’s get into it!
Full disclosure – I have not used every single plugin that I’m about to mention on a live website.
In fact, the only one I still use today is Affiliate Royale – which I will discuss in more detail later. This is the plugin that powers my own affiliate program for the products I sell on this website.
However, I’ve done extensive research into each plugin I will share here, and will be basing my judgement on the following:
I have been running affiliate programs for several years now, and consider my affiliate program on my website a vital component of my business success, so I hope to share some of my lessons with you as well!
Out of all of the affiliate program plugins available, I have narrowed it down to the following:
I first discovered this plugin after realizing that several affiliate programs I’m personally a part of, run on AffiliateWP.
From an affiliate’s standpoint, I already know that it has just about anything that an affiliate would need to find success with the program. When I began researching it from a website owner’s perspective, I began to understand why so many people choose it. In fact, if I were starting my affiliate program today, this may have been the one I would have ended up going for.
Some standout features include…
AffiliateWP also seems to still be in active development, with frequent updates as well, which is nice. It covers everything most people would need, and new features are still coming out.
AffiliateWP starts at $99 per year, and goes up to $250 / year for their highest-tier offer. Note that some of the features mentioned above are only available on the highest-tier.
Learn more about AffiliateWP by clicking here!
If you aren’t ready to invest in a paid solution, Affiliates Manager is probably the best free affiliate program plugin for WordPress.
Affiliates manager may not have any fancy extra features that the paid plugins can provide, but it will cover all of your basics, including:
Again, it is certainly not the greatest affiliate plugin out there. However, considering its completely free, you can’t really complain!
Learn more about Affiliates Manager by clicking here!
As mentioned previously, Affiliate Royale is the plugin I use for my own personal affiliate program. It came bundled with MemberPress when I purchased it, which is how I first became introduced to the plugin in the first place.
I’d consider it about a tie with AffiliateWP in terms of features – you can do just about anything you’d want or need to with Affiliate Royale, and I haven’t really found any reason why I’d want to switch away from it.
Some of the features I appreciate having include…
It is a little bit clunky from an admin’s perspective, but there really shouldn’t be a whole lot of work you need to do with it once it’s set up, so I personally think it’s pretty easy to look past.
Affiliate Royale is currently $85 for a one-site license, and includes one year of support and updates. If you want to run an affiliate program on multiple websites, they also offer a developer license for $165. This makes it a great choice for agencies, as there is no limitation to the number of websites you can install it on.
Learn more about Affiliate Royale by clicking here!
I was a little taken back by this plugin when I first came across it, because their website is riddled with grammar errors. It gave off the sense of being a bit unprofessional, and to be quite honest, I was worried that the plugin would be complete junk.
I was wrong!
In fact, there are thousands of great reviews on this plugin from website owners across a large variety of industries.
Some of the standout features include:
Ultimate Affiliate Manager is the cheapest paid plugin on this list, coming in at $59 for a lifetime license. The biggest complaint I’ve seen with Ultimate Affiliate Manager is that the support isn’t that great. Some users have complained that support has taken a week to get back to them, while others have mentioned that they have had their problem ignored completely. Of course, people are more likely to speak out when they have a bad experience rather than a good one, but considering this is the cheapest (paid) option on the list, you may get what you pay for.
Learn more about Ultimate Affiliate Manager by clicking here!
If I had to choose what plugin I’d consider to be the best, it would probably be AffiliateWP.
However, the best value for the price has to go to Affiliate Royale. Affiliate Royale is more than enough for just about everyone, and is only 1/3rd the cost of AffiliateWP’s top plan (unless you buy their lifetime license, which becomes cheaper after 6 years.)
There are a few reasons I rank AffiliateWP a bit higher than Affiliate Royale – AffiliateWP has a few more features, better reporting, and (in my opinion) an interface that’s easier to work with.
It’s also updated far more frequently. To be honest, I can’t recall a single new feature added during my first year with Affiliate Royale.
That being said, AffiliateWP only has a significant edge when you sign up for their more expensive plan, that includes all of their pro add-ons.
Depending on the complexity of your requirements, AffiliateWP may or may not be worth the extra $160 / year. And to be honest, you really couldn’t go wrong with either Affiliate Royale or AffiliateWP.
Learn more about Affiliate Royale by clicking here!
Learn more about AffiliateWP by clicking here!
To be quite honest, you really can’t go wrong with any of the plugins mentioned within this article. All of them have the basic features most affiliate programs would need, and any differences between the paid plugins are not all that substantial.
Of course, considering how valuable an affiliate program could be for your company, it makes sense to go with the best possible option from the very start. When your affiliate program succeeds, all of the time and money spent getting it going will have been well worth it.
I’d love to hear which you end up going with!
Wishing you the best,
– James McAllister
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]]>You didn’t operate like a normal business. You didn’t sell anything to a potential customer. You relied on other income streams like advertising revenue, or promoting other people’s products as an affiliate. All of your income came from a third-party rather than from the customer themselves.
I was this way too – for many years in fact. And I’ll be honest with you, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But let’s be real here – money often comes much easier when you are on the other side of the coin. When you create a product, and let everyone else do the hard work of marketing it for you. After all, it’s not like you lose anything – they only get paid when you get paid. Profit all around.
This is the exact strategy I’ve used to take my digital product sales to the next level. Let me explain.
I previously hosted my courses on Udemy.com. Through this website, I was able to reach many interested buyers and make quite a few sales each day without any real effort on my part. I could disappear for a month, and those organic sales would still come in.
I also have my website here and my email list. My courses were promoted to a good amount of people each day through these two platforms, resulting in a small but consistent stream of sales.
There’s a problem though. A horrible problem.
My reach was limited.
No matter how much time I put into promoting my website and getting people onto my email list, I can only reach so many people. I can only promote my courses to a certain amount of people each day.
No matter how big or small our businesses are, we all have our limits.
Instead of fighting this, let’s instead use it to our advantage. Each individual person may only be able to reach and influence a certain number of people each day, but that doesn’t matter.
If we can unite people together to share a common goal, powerful things can be done.
Let’s say you own a small store somewhere in your hometown. It is profitable. It is doing well.
However, regardless of how populated your area is, only a certain number of people will see and enter the store each day.
Your system is profitable, but you’ve hit a ceiling. What do you do?
The answer is simple. When you can afford it, you build another store in a different, good location which then increases your total profits further.
Logically, you would continue to do this as long as it made sense and resulted in overall profits increasing. This is how massive franchises are made.
However, you can only manage and run one store. In order to open up more stores, you must sacrifice some of the new store’s profits to hire a manager to run the store for you.
Online, the same idea applies. Instead of stores, you have websites or email lists. And instead of managers, you have affiliates.
Affiliates allow you to reach exponentially more people. However, you must also give up a percentage of your profit to pay them for all the benefits they provide.
Is this worth it? Absolutely. Again, massive companies aren’t built off of one store. They develop a system that is profitable, and scale it up as much as they can. Even if a store isn’t making a huge amount of profit each month, positive cashflow is positive cashflow and can be reinvested into the company somehow.
Selling digital products with the help of affiliates is a guaranteed way to succeed because you are literally giving up nothing. It costs you nothing to deliver a digital product. Every sale you make, even if you only make a penny of profit off of it, is still an extra penny you would have not had without the help of your affiliate.
Sure, there are customer service costs, but these are miniscule compared to your total revenue and can be easily outsourced.
Heck, licensing companies build their entire business around this. License an invention to an existing company with a huge global reach, and get paid sometimes fractions of a penny per sale of that item.
Doesn’t seem like much, does it?
However, the volume in sales allows the people selling the license to rake in an unbelievable amount of money, while doing virtually zero work.
I know that giving up as much as 75% of your product’s price as a commission can be scary, but I want you to think of it from this perspective. It doesn’t matter how much you make per sale. What matters the most is the total amount of profit you have made in the end.
I would rather sell 500 copies of my courses for $50 in profit each than 50 copies of my courses for $197 each.
Again, in the end, the only thing that matters is total profit.
As mentioned earlier, most of us start out as affiliates rather than product creators. This makes sense.
You could start promoting somebody’s product today and see results from it, where creating a product can take months of hard work with no reward whatsoever.
There’s nothing wrong with this. However, if you have created a product and you want to sell more of it, I want you to take advantage of the fact that most people will remain affiliates.
I want you to send out emails right now to other bloggers and marketers in your product’s niche, pitching your product to them and hopefully bringing them onboard as an affiliate. Start with your power base – the group of people who are closest to you.
Take advantage of their reach. Use them to sell your product and make you both money. And then, hopefully your product will bring people back to your site as well.
It’s almost like getting paid to advertise your own website.
It’s time for you to scale up. Scaling up is difficult if you try to do it alone.
Seek out a team of affiliates who will work under you, and allow them to build your business for you while they are fairly compensated themselves. Everyone wins.
Don’t become the mom and pop store on the corner that barely covers its own expenses. Mimic the enormous franchise that ends up becoming a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Leverage the reach of others, and it won’t be long before your profits skyrocket.
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